Tuesday, June 28, 2016

High DPI

Worklog Assistant now supports HiDPI out of of the box on Windows, MacOS and Linux. Click through for an actual screenshot:

Single sign-on support

Preliminary support for single-sign on via SPNEGO and Kerberos on Windows is now available. Previously, only NTLM was supported. To make use of it, leave your username and password blank when configuring your connection.

Other changes/bug fixes

Note:Mac/Linux users may have to manually relaunch through Spotlight/Unity after upgrading

This release includes more than 500 sets of changes but here are the main points:

Completely redesigned main window

Bringing back the 1.0 love, the new main window features an incredibly fast search, a gorgeous way to review what you spent your time on, worklog rounding and combining, and a timesheet that just won't quit.

Scroll for more

How fast is fast?

Check it out:

How gorgeous is gorgeous?

Aside from using a native UI, the interface is more colourful and personalized to your particular project. Your avatars, project icons, workflow icons are all available in the always blazing fast, never blocking UI.

A much faster timer window

The new timer window is so fast, that you will never be interrupted to think about time tracking again. Use the global keyboard shortcuts to quickly change your task, toggle the timer, or add some worklog notes

Sunday, August 18, 2013

This is a bug fix release only but I recommend that you upgrade if you've been having issues with weird timeouts with JIRA OnDemand.

If for nothing, do it to compensate me for the 3 hours testing cycle for each attempt at a fix. Yes, it took 3 hours to reproduce the issue each time and took me 3 or 4 weeks before I could even reproduce it reliably thanks to a lucky email from a customer that triggered a new approach.

I can unequivocally state that I have the best group of customers in the entire software business who are so willing to help test fixes like this with the patience of a ninja assassin. For all of you, I present you with the Ninja Assassin Patience Customer Prize:

As always, feel free to contact me if you have any questions, comments or suggestions.

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Hello and welcome to another edition of "Stuff you didn't know you could do with Worklog Assistant."

As referenced in a previous post, custom scripts are a nifty way to extend Worklog Assistant to perform issue-specific housekeeping tasks.

For example, I use custom scripts to create and merge branches for a given issue. This is done through a "Context menu" script which allows me to add custom commands to any issue:

One of the recent additions to Worklog Assistant are a couple of new of "hooks" (in the Emacs parlance) or "extension points" (in Eclipse-speak).

The new hooks (can you guess what editor I use?) allow you to run a script when you toggle the timer on an issue and/or run a script once a minute.

People are already using them! Michael van Engelshoven was kind enough to share that he uses the new functionality to generate a git commit template:

With the output looking something like this:

But that's not all! As the title of this post suggests, it is possible to use custom scripts to prevent yourself from accidentally logging work on issues that you should not log work on. For example, against issues that are not assigned to you. In this case, I will show an example of how you can generate an informative message when you unintentionally start logging work against a sub-task.

All properties of the current issue are exposed through environment variables. For example, the summary field of an issue is exposed as the variable JIRA_Summary

Scripts that have a non-zero exit code are assumed to have failed and the user is notified.

Putting these together, we might guess as to how to prevent a user from tracking against an issue that is not a sub-task:

Create an "Issue Timer Toggle" custom script (the name is horrible, sorry)

Detect if the issue is a sub-task

If not, the script should fail with an error message

And that is exactly what is done here:

The script is specific to Windows but it can easily be modified for other platforms:

@ECHO OFF

if "%JIRA_IsSubtask%" == "0" (

echo ---------------------------

echo %JIRA_Key% is not a sub-task!

echo ---------------------------

echo Please choose a sub-task

exit 1

)

When I toggle a timer on an issue that is not a sub-task, I am greeted by this message, fully customized by you!

This wraps up another edition of "Cats riding invisible bikes" "Stuff you didn't know you could do with Worklog Assistant." To find out more, check out the documentation on custom scripts. As always, have a nice day and feel free to contact me with any questions, comments or suggestions!

No post is complete without a funny picture of a cat so here is a coder cat:

Sunday, June 3, 2012

So it's that time of year again. New blog post! Don't you worry, releases have been occurring frequently even without blog posts. I have just gotten a little behind in updating the blog :)

The biggest change since the last blog post is JIRA 5 support. And the biggest implication from the user's perspective is that you no longer need any server-side plugin to access the "extra" data that we needed to before. Yay Atlassian! I'll be happy to retire that thorn-in-my-side at some point.

Besides that, a whole bunch of stability-related fixes have been included which should make Worklog Assistant run much longer and better for you. I not-so-infrequently get people emailing me telling me that they have left Worklog Assistant running for months! So to the few of you who have been having some problems (Mac users especially), you should be much happier. I couldn't have done it without the help of some very helpful customers who sent me log after log and tested build after build. Thank you! Here is a cat riding a bike for all your hard work:

In implementing the JIRA 5 support, I was able to clean up a lot of cruft and I am very happy with how things have turned out. I also brought in some code from v2 which was nice.

Check out the Atlassian Marketplace listing for Worklog Assistant. Leave a nice review for li'l ol me if you feel up to it :)

About this blog

We strongly believe that tracking your time properly is the first step to deterministic software development. If you feel that you have been guessing or you can't be bothered to remember to log time, Worklog Assistant might be for you!